Infinite Matter — Turning plastic waste into art

A mere 80 years is all it took for plastic to become truly ever-present in our lives. It’s on our grocery shelves, in the fibres in our clothes, and in our car parts, but also, inevitably, in the ocean, in groundwater... and even in the food we eat.

Its intrusive presence is largely due to the fact that plastic has long been considered to be “disposable.” It has even become a pillar of the so-called linear “produce-consume-and-discard” economy.

Fortunately, times are changing, along with our laws and behaviour. People in Québec have largely adopted waste-sorting. In 2021, 75% of waste products sent to sorting centres came from municipal waste-collection programs, in other words, from citizens*. Gradually, industries, businesses, and institutions are joining the movement.

Despite this great effort, in 2021, only 36% of the plastic discarded in Québec was recycled. The remaining 64%, totalling 158,000 tonnes of plastic waste, ended up in landfills or incinerators.

HDPE plastic (also known as number 2 plastic), which is found in much product packaging (from shower gels to laundry detergent), accounted for 18,000 to 148,000 tonnes of the plastic discarded in 2020 and 2021**. In addition to these alarming figures, there are also unaccounted-for quantities of plastic waste that are neither sorted nor recycled and end up directly in the environment.

At some point in 2021, Olivier Paré, then a space designer at TUX, met Olivier Bonnard, a multidisciplinary artist who had decided to build his environmental beliefs into his artistic practice. He is also one of the co-founders of Studio Ascètes, which transforms waste into design objects.

The teams at TUX Karma work in the world of design, creation, and advertising, where promoting objects that use plastic is part and parcel of their job. Unsurprisingly, our teams are also experiencing a great deal of eco-anxiety.

This was the meeting that set things in motion. How could TUX Karma and Studio Ascètes join forces to turn our shared eco-anxiety into inspired, inspiring, and, above all, useful action?

Nearly two years later in May 2023, TUX Karma launched the Matière infinie project. This exhibition, devised and developed in collaboration with Studio Ascètes, invites us to discover the new “design incarnations” of plastics number 2 (HDPE), number 1 (PET), number 4 (LDPE), number 5 (PP), and number 6 (PS). How was this achieved? Through talent, perseverance, and a large measure of faith in the future!

*Source: La collecte sélective (selective collection), RECYC-QUÉBEC, 2021.

**Source: Étude de caractérisation à l’élimination 2019-2020 (2019-2020 characterization study at disposal), RECYC-QUÉBEC, 2021. (A range of values is provided rather than a specific figure, as some data published in the study combine HDPE with other types of plastic.)

Tables, lampshades, glasses, and stools: at first glance, it’s hard to imagine that the design furniture on display in the Matière infinie exhibition was created using stuff from our trash bins. Nevertheless, the members at Studio Ascètes did indeed recover a colossal quantity of plastic containers, which they went on to clean, melt, and mould.

And the result is an installation in a gallery created for the occasion, in conjunction with TUX Karma teams, at Café-buvette Brouillon in Plaza Saint-Hubert. The venue consists of three small lounges separated by heavy black curtains. The first lounge recalls the innocence of childhood: light and airy, with curved furniture and smooth surfaces that can easily be mistaken for marble. The second lounge immerses us in a more colourful and structured world, that of adulthood, when we are often required to fit into the boxes that society provides. The chess set built right into the table is a nod to the strategies we use to get ahead in the world.

The last lounge, which is darker, more gnarly and yet more fluid, almost vegetal, evokes the age when, after years of trying to fit into a mould, we finally allow ourselves to be ourselves. To make this poetic stage design possible, we had to harness our artistic vision, along with an enormous amount of manual and technical effort.

This is the story told, in words and images, by TUX Karma teams, throughout the gallery. It’s also what the presence of a strange machine, built by Studio Ascètes co-founder Oliver Heaps, hints at. Using a second-hand treadmill, this extruder shreds plastic waste, then melts it and moulds it into design objects.

Matière infinie, which is interactive and open to the public, invites us to touch, see, and feel this substance that we don’t even pay attention to any more because we encounter it everywhere. The teams at TUX Karma, Studio Ascètes, and Café-buvette Brouillon have taken the idea to its extreme, and now you can almost taste the plastic, thanks to a menu inspired by the exhibition.

Eggs, sponge cake, and beets... these simple products, crafted into elegant optical illusions, suggest, for a fleeting moment, that some of this designer plastic has landed onto our plates. The same goes for the cocktails, where a recipe devised for the occasion mirrors the theme of the exhibition.

• Raising awareness: reaching out to at least one hundred influential players in the world of arts and design.
• Recognition and understanding: letting the public know about the Studio Ascètes approach.
• Behaviour: encouraging circular re-use of plastic containers.
• Waste recovery: using plastics to produce works.

Change indicators

• Attendance at the exhibition
• Media coverage of the exhibition
• Number of plastic containers collected during the exhibition
• Quantity of plastics collected for the exhibition furniture